


Call This Home Tonight

by paperstorm



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Foreshadowing, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, M/M, Missing Scene, Nicky and the author both love Yusuf Al-Kaysani just an absolutely ridiculous amount and it shows, POV Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Romance, Sad Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Softness between Nicky and Joe, Somewhat Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:34:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27412027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm
Summary: He always puts himself between Joe and the door. Nicky isn’t sure if Joe’s ever noticed; they’ve never, in over 900 years, discussed it. Nicky does it as an impulse these days, and perhaps Joe has sunk similarly into their pattern. Joe loves to hold, to give, to spread his warmth, and the world around them had never returned his generosity, so Nicky had placed himself in front of it, shielding him from all the darkness Joe didn’t want to see.//A missing moment from the movie, between the 'dinner at the Goussainville safehouse' scene and the 'Nile dreams of Quynh' scene.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 44
Kudos: 353





	Call This Home Tonight

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone who's been reading my fics for a while knows I have an utter obsession with filling in 'missing scenes' from canon. This is the first one in that vein I've written for The Old Guard but it could easily turn into a small series if I get the itch to fill in more gaps from the movie.
> 
> Title is from the song Runaway by Thriving Ivory

Nicky leaves Andy and Booker with less than a third of the last bottle left. Andy is pink-cheeked and in much higher spirits than Nicky has seen her in days, which only serves to remind how low she’s been. Booker is slipping into French on every fourth word as he tries to tell her a war story he’s told them multiple times over the decades. Joe had given up on them – with a smile and a shake of his head, in that fond, tender way of his – nearly an hour ago. Nicky missed them so much while they were apart. He missed his family, but he finally acknowledges that even their super-human bodies need sleep, so he bids them good night and rounds the corner to the room where they sleep.  
  
Nearest to the door, a small and completely immobile pile under a blanket reveals that Nile is gone to the world, sleeping soundly on an old twin mattress. Nicky hovers in the doorway for a moment and simply looks at her, even though he can’t really see her, only the shape of her curled into a ball and the very top of her head. She’s so, so young. Nicky supposes he was, too, the day he died and was reborn, but he doesn’t remember feeling it. People didn’t live so long, all those centuries ago. 30 years old was middle-aged or beyond. In this century, her entire life should be ahead of her. And in a way, it is. But in another, more tragic way, it is not.  
  
Joe catches him staring. Nicky’s eyes raise to him, where he’s sitting in the far corner of the room on their makeshift bed. He’s leaning against the wall, bare feet planted on the sheet and knees drawn up, his sketch book resting open against a thigh. His dark eyes shine in the low lamplight as they meet Nicky’s, forehead drawn into a sympathetic frown. He’s as beautiful as ever, even in whatever sadness tugs at the sensitive strings of his gentle heart just now.  
  
Nicky steps around the smaller mattresses where Andy and Booker usually sleep – their group’s newest member occupying the former at the moment – and moves toward Joe. At the foot of their double-bed he reaches down to remove his shoes, first the left and then the right, and then lowers down to his knees so he can crawl to sit next to Joe, his back similarly against the dingy wallpaper and their legs touching.  
  
“Can I see?” he asks, in a low murmur so as not to wake Nile, nodding toward Joe’s sketchbook.  
  
Wordlessly, Joe holds it up, showing him. Sometimes he won’t let Nicky look at his work until it’s finished; this time he doesn’t hesitate.  
  
Nicky feels something inside him melt like ice cream in July as he looks down at his own face smiling back at him in hasty charcoal lines, and Joe’s, and Andy’s, and Booker’s. In the center of them is Nile, with her braids framing her plump cheeks and her smile brilliant and blinding. There are arms around her coming from all sides, _their_ arms.  
  
He blinks and his brow furrows as he looks back at Joe, who licks his lips and shrugs. He goes to lower the book but Nicky takes it from his hands, bringing it closer to examine it better in the dim room.  
  
“Joe,” he whispers. Their images seem to dance before him, lifelike even in their stillness. In shadowy echoes in his mind Nicky can nearly hear their laughter. The way Andy would tease, if Joe dragged them into a group hug like this. The way Booker would complain but would cling tighter than any of them.  
  
“I thought … she kept looking at her phone,” Joe says, folding his hands in his lap now that they’re free of the book. “She was trying to hide it under the blanket but I could see the light. She can’t ever see her family again. I thought maybe she’d like it. Knowing we’re her family, now, if she wants us.”  
  
Nicky puts the book down on his other side because suddenly he can’t look at it anymore, the ache in his heart is too great. He reaches out, taking Joe’s cheek in his hand and guiding him into a kiss. It lingers; soft, familiar brushes of their lips and Joe’s fingers squeezing a loose handful in the front of Nicky’s shirt.  
  
“You are the sweetest man,” Nicky breathes against Joe’s mouth, resting their foreheads together, “who has ever lived. None of us deserve you but we’re so lucky to have you with us.”  
  
“I don’t know about all that,” Joe laughs softly. His grip slackens on Nicky’s shirt and he lifts his arm instead, inviting Nicky to lean in against the solid warmth of his chest. Nicky does, tipping his head to rest against the pillow of Joe’s beard and Joe’s arm goes around his shoulders, heavy and secure. They’re never in one place for long but Nicky’s never needed to be, because his home is right here, in Joe’s arms, no matter where they are.  
  
Across the room, Nile shifts in her sleep but doesn’t wake.  
  
“What a mess for her to be brought into,” Joe says, quiet and empathetic. He kisses Nicky’s hair and leaves his chin resting there.  
  
Nicky nods in agreement. He wishes it hadn’t been that way. It wasn’t easy for any of them when it was new, but this feels particularly complicated. He slides an arm around Joe’s middle and tucks his nose against Joe’s neck. The chaos around them doesn’t feel as if it can touch him, if he’s cuddled up with Joe. “And for Andy, for her first mission back with us.”  
  
“I hate how … defeated she seems.”  
  
“I know.” Nicky closes his eyes and inhales, breathing in Joe’s comforting scent. He’s noticed, too. They haven’t talked about it, but they’ve all noticed. Their year apart was supposed to be the break she needed to _get her head back on straight_. That’s what she’d said. And she’s come back to them more lost than ever.  
  
Betraying their words, Andy laughs audibly from the other room, crows _no you did not!_ at Booker, and then he laughs as well, although not quite as brightly. It’s different, though, from how she’s been until this evening. Nicky has never known her to give up. They’ve committed months, years sometimes, to saving just one or two people. They searched for Quynh for centuries before Andy finally called it off. The idea of her so sure that they aren’t helping, that nothing they’ve done has mattered, makes something profound and uncomfortable throb in Nicky’s chest. She’s always been their compass. If she doesn’t believe they’re putting good into the world, it’s more difficult for Nicky to believe it, and he needs to believe it. He needs that more than Booker and Joe do.  
  
“I miss Genoa already,” he says, referring to their small house by the sea where they’d spent the year apart from Andy and Booker, so they don’t have to discuss any further the sad state of their oldest friend and wonder, even though she’d insisted, whether maybe they shouldn’t have left her alone.  
  
“Mm.” Joe chuckles lowly into Nicky’s hair. “So do I, very much. It was a dream, being there with you all those months. Kissing you awake in the mornings, laughing with you in the moonlight.”  
  
“What about the rest of what we did in the moonlight?” Nicky teases.  
  
“Oh _that_ ,” Joe muses, pretending to have just remembered endless nights tangled in sheets together, with squeezing hands and wandering lips, with Joe heavy against Nicky’s hips, with the sounds of them spilling into quiet, humid rooms. “Yes, I guess that was fun as well.”  
  
“You guess!” Nicky pokes him in the ribs and Joe chuckles and shushes him.  
  
“You’ll wake her,” he scolds gently, and then nudges Nicky’s face up for another kiss and whispers, “it was heavenly. Licking the ocean salt from your skin, drowning happily in the ways you touch me. All the poets in all the world would fail to capture how wonderous you are to me, my Nicolò. How you stir me, how you steal my heart each time you smile.”  
  
He had only been teasing, but Joe stuns him momentarily, as he still can after all these years, and Nicky has to fiercely remind himself of where they are, in a chaste kiss that longs to deepen but can’t. At least not tonight.  
  
“We should sleep,” Joe says to him, and Nicky nods in agreement. Outside the room, they can still hear the sounds of Andy and Booker and the clink of glasses, but exhaustion weighs on Nicky like a thick fog, and he could easily fall into dreams right here against Joe’s chest but they’ll be more comfortable if they lie down instead.  
  
They rearrange, not removing any further articles of clothing like they normally would but settling onto their sides, facing each other. Joe’s leg hooks over Nicky’s. He holds Nicky’s cheek in his hand and Nicky lets his eyes close, soothed by the rhythmic brushing of Joe’s thumb underneath his eye. He thinks, as the tendrils of sleep tug at him, that they shouldn’t have put Nile in Andy’s bed. She’s brand new, and they’re all being actively hunted. They should have placed her where Joe is, at the very back of the room, furthest from the entrance to it. Nicky hadn’t thought of it, hours earlier when he’d shown Nile to their beds. He wouldn’t want to wake her now.  
  
He always puts himself between Joe and the door. Nicky isn’t sure if Joe’s ever noticed; they’ve never, in over 900 years, discussed it. Nicky does it as an impulse these days, and perhaps Joe has sunk similarly into their pattern. It started in the 11th century, after they’d let go of their hatred and the lies they had been born into. Joe gives every part of himself so freely. Liberal to a fault with his heart, with how easily he loves, with how lovingly he cares for. He sees good in everyone and everything, even when there is none to be found by anyone else. So early in their journey together it made Nicky long to protect him, to keep that tender heart safe from a world that was unworthy of it. Joe loves to hold, to give, to spread his warmth, and the world around them had never returned his generosity, so Nicky had placed himself in front of it, shielding him from all the darkness Joe didn’t want to see.  
  
“Where is Andy going to sleep?” Joe asks, reading Nicky’s thoughts and voicing them.  
  
“I doubt she is.”  
  
It isn’t Nicky who answers, but Booker. His voice reaches them from the mouth of the room, and Nicky opens his eyes and twists to look at him over his shoulder. Booker enters the room, scrubbing his hands over his flushed face and walking around Nile as Nicky had earlier. He kicks off his boots with much less care for the noise it makes than Nicky had, and collapses down onto his bed between them.  
  
“We could make room,” Nicky says.  
  
Booker heaves a tired sigh and punches his pillow lightly three times, working out the lumps and squishing it into a smaller ball for him to rest his head on. “I told her that,” he says as he makes himself comfortable. “She definitely heard me but didn’t answer.”  
  
Nicky looks back at Joe for a moment, and then he rolls over to face their friend, instead. Joe instantly moves in closer to him, molding himself to Nicky’s back, snaking an arm around his middle. As a reflex, his body responding to Joe’s entirely on instinct, Nicky leans back against him, burrowing into his heat. With his hand, though, he reaches out and brushes his fingers along Booker’s forearm.  
  
“Sébastien,” he says softly.  
  
Booker cracks one eye open and raises an eyebrow in question.  
  
“It’s good to see you. We missed you,” Nicky tells him. It’s the truth, and he doesn’t understand why it makes Booker shut his eyes again and turn his forehead into the pillow like he doesn’t want Nicky to see him.  
  
“Yeah,” he answers, something small and undecipherable in his voice. His dark blond hair falls across his face in strands, hiding him even further.  
  
Nicky had thought, so many times over their year apart, that they should call him. It had nagged at him, scratched like an insect at the back of his skull, but he’d never said it out loud. He’d never suggested it. He wonders if Joe had thought about it, too, but had selfishly resisted like Nicky did because he’d wanted Joe all to himself.  
  
Behind him, Joe’s hips shift, pressing in closer to the curve of Nicky’s backside, melding them together all the way down. His lips find Nicky’s neck, a warm, wet press of a kiss to the nape of it.  
  
Nicky doesn’t retract his hand. His fingers move down Booker’s arm until he finds his hand, and Nicky takes it in his own and squeezes it. He meant what he’d said; he did miss their friend. It wasn’t a sense of guilt or duty that had him wanting to call Booker. He’s their brother, their family.  
  
Booker doesn’t open his eyes but he squeezes Nicky’s hand in return, just for a moment, before he lets go.  
  
“Hey, Bash, wanna spoon with us?” Joe jokes.  
  
Nicky expects it to break the tension. He expects Booker to chuckle, and tell Joe to go fuck himself, and for them to slip right back into their old, familiar dynamic.  
  
Booker doesn’t. His eyelids lift, just briefly, just long enough to blink at them twice with shining eyes, and then he rolls over onto his other side, away from them, with tension in his shoulders and his arms crossed in front of him.  
  
Nicky frowns, blinking himself in surprise. He turns, rolling over half onto a rounded shoulder so he can look up at Joe, who exhales slowly, as much confusion written on his dark features as Nicky’s sure there is on his own. Joe shakes his head to say he doesn’t know either and they won’t solve it tonight, placing a kiss on Nicky’s forehead and then wrapping him up. With Booker and Nile in Nicky’s line of sight to his front, Joe solid and safe at his back, and the sound of their oldest friend dragging a chair across the floor in the other room, Nicky falls into an uneasy, fitful sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!!
> 
> Come talk to me [on tumblr](http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/) if you want!


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